A Toast to the Nominees, With Drinks They Inspired

Even the most informed awards prognosticators differ on whether “The King’s Speech” or “The Social Network” will win the ultimate prize on Sunday. There’s uncertainty, too, in the best actress enclave. Could Annette Bening, thrice cold-shouldered by the Academy, prevail over Natalie Portman, whose monthslong publicity blitz rivals the veritable Oscar panhandling that cinched Sandra Bullock’s victory last year?

But let’s talk about a matter of infinitely greater urgency and suspense. What cocktail best complements Hollywood’s annual orgy of self-congratulation?

I threw that question out to four distinguished New York bartenders, or rather asked them to participate in a challenge — with a twist. Each had to create a drink that paid tribute to, and was named for, a nominated performer of my choosing. The drink was ideally supposed to reflect not only the performer but also the role.

I made sure, before doling out assignments, that each bartender had seen the performance drawing liquid homage. I made sure, too, that all four acting categories were represented. That calculus produced this menu: the Natalie Portman, the James Franco (best actor), the Helena Bonham Carter (best supporting actress) and the Jeremy Renner (best supporting actor).

Some make for easier mixing and drinking than others. The Helena, for example, requires only a few ingredients and no fancy technique. The Natalie, by contrast, has a rococo construction befitting the frenzied filmmaking of “Black Swan,” her showcase. The James makes some big demands as well. A busy man yielded a busy elixir.

But individually and in aggregate, all four drinks speak to how cleverly allusive cocktails can be and illustrate the kind of thought processes that go into their making. Even if none of them suits your fancy — the recipes are all on The Times’s Web site, where there’s also a video providing glimpses of their assembly — one or more may well give you ideas of your own or lead you back to a classic that seems just right for that unfailingly electric moment when the best song victor is revealed.

Let’s start with the Natalie, which fell to Eamon Rockey, the general manager of Compose, a new restaurant and bar in TriBeCa. I e-mailed these instructions to him:

“This assignment should be a cakewalk. Make that a cake prance. Tutus, feathers, anorexia, pregnancy, an intergalactic princess who has also done time on the pole — between Natalie’s character in the movie, Natalie the mother-to-be and Natalie’s past roles, there’s an awful lot to work with. Duality! You’ve got that, too! I have it on good authority that the working title of ‘Black Swan’ was ‘Dance of the Doppelgängers,’ but a studio head nixed it. Said it sounded like German animation or something.”

Photo

The Natalie Portman by Eamon Rockey.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Mr. Rockey took the feathers part to heart. His Natalie not only included frothed egg white — the indirect bequest of a bird — but also involved a feathery design on its surface. As for duality, the drink had discernible layers: the top white one and, below it, a well of dark red. Mr. Rockey accomplished this by using a funnel to channel red wine into the bottom of the drink.

“An incredibly complex character demands an incredibly complex cocktail,” he told me as he made it, using not only the wine and egg white but also what he called “a very pretty gin,” befitting a ballerina, along with Triple Sec, gum syrup, lemon juice and Angostura bitters.

Did I mention the absinthe mist? I liked that touch, suggestive of madness, which is a central theme of “Black Swan.” The absinthe also connected the drink to a classic that Mr. Rockey was deliberately using as a springboard, the Corpse Reviver No. 2. Another of the movie’s major themes, he noted, is rebirth.

To capture James Franco in “127 Hours” was the task of Demetrios Saites, who tends bar at the Hurricane Club near Madison Square Park.

“I’m not one to micromanage or plant suggestions,” I wrote to him, “but I could, for example, foresee a situation in which the drink you come up with isn’t on the rocks, plural, but something with one big rock. And is that a gherkin I see under it, wriggling to be free?”

Mr. Saites did me one better. Instead of putting a block of ice in the drink, he put a smooth black stone that had spent time in the freezer and performed the same function.

He created a cocktail in two parts: the main drink, which had that stone, and a coconut-flavored chaser of sorts, in a shot glass. The main drink combined gold rum, lemon juice, tea, cocoa nibs and Thai chili and bitters to produce what he said he intended to be “the hue of the desert,” a nod to the movie’s setting. The tea, caffeinated, was an oblique reference to the peppy schedule Mr. Franco keeps as actor, writer, student and more.

“He seems like an energetic guy,” Mr. Saites said. And the plight of his “127 Hours” character was captured by presenting two drinks in one. Hydration-deprived, the character would want all the fluid he could get.

Video

Tipsy Diaries: Tipsy at the Oscars

Frank Bruni, a former restaurant critic for The Times, assigns four New York bartenders the task of creating cocktails inspired by a selection of Oscar performances this year.

What would Mr. Renner’s character in “The Town” want? Or what would do that character justice?

“It had to be dark, stirred, bitter and a little strong,” said Leo Robitschek, the head bartender at the elegant restaurant Eleven Madison Park, noting that Mr. Renner played a tormented, tormenting hothead. So Mr. Robitschek came up with something along the lines of a Manhattan, though in place of bitters he used Cynar, a bitter Italian liqueur made with artichoke and a bevy of herbs.

And this Manhattan manqué arrived by way of Boston, where “The Town” is set. To reflect that city’s Celtic pride, Mr. Robitschek used Jameson Irish whiskey in the drink, which could be relatively simply reproduced by the neophyte mixologist at home.

So could the cocktail conceived by Meaghan Dorman in honor of Ms. Bonham Carter’s performance in “The King’s Speech.”

Ms. Dorman, the head bartender at Raines Law Room, near Union Square, said she based her drink loosely on one called the Self-Starter, as described in “The Savoy Cocktail Book,” named for the regal British hotel.

For a base she used gin, solidifying that British association, and to that she added apricot liqueur, for sweetness.

“She’s amazingly sweet in the movie,” Ms. Dorman said, referring to Ms. Bonham Carter’s character, “really looking after her family and her husband and kind of being a self-starter and going out of the royal bubble.”

The drink’s other main component is Cocchi Americano, an aperitif wine similar to Kina Lillet. And because the drink is meant to be “elegant, like a lady,” Ms. Dorman said, it is stirred rather than shaken.

“Stirred drinks are really silky,” Ms. Dorman observed, adding that hers “looks like a pearl” and the actress “was wearing pearls.” So she was, and so can you, as you draw sustenance from the Helena and experience the Oscar-caliber elation that she — or, for that matter, the Natalie, the James and the Jeremy — can bring.

A version of this article appears in print on February 25, 2011, on page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Toast to the Nominees, With Drinks They Inspired. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe